


Our Secret Selves

by speakmefair



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Gen, Snow, Snow and Ice, Snowball Fight, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 00:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It might only last for an hour, it might be as long as a day.  But for now there is magic, and Charles watches it happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Secret Selves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sorujaa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorujaa/gifts).



> This is a terrible mish-mash of every X-Men verse ever, which makes it (almost) an AU. 'Tis the...season?

_The snow floats down upon us, mingled with rain..._  
 _It eddies around pale lilac lamps, and falls_  
 _Down golden-windowed walls._

 

This should be a story, Charles thinks. 

A tall tale, a fairy tale, 

(a tale told by an idiot)

spun-sugar words of _once upon a time,_

of _now as I was,_

of _young and easy,_

(and _as I walked out one midsummer morning,_ he would have said once, but no, that's a bad joke these days, and no-one left to smile at it.

No.

There are better ways to catch the mind's eye, a child's ear, an open heart.)

There are ways that go like this: _A long time ago, the old people say..._

and _Did you ever hear the story of...?_

It should be a story.

A story told about all of them, true and false, with all their attributes, good and bad, exaggerated in each of them. No template cut heroes and villains, but only the beautiful, the incandescent, the fantastical, and oh, their story, their fairy tale, their _fable!_

One which would be, Charles knew, full of unbelievable characters,

_who lived far beyond the edge of the world..._

and a story from a time when princes still set out to seek their fortunes and when kind old women still sometimes turned out to be witches — in a clever disguise...

A story that was _full of sound and fury_

and therefore fit for a tale of fantastical beasts. A story, Charles thinks, that T H White would have been proud of. A story that the Questing Beast would have roared at happily, and added a little more detail to it 'for veracity's sake' and that King Pellinore would have beamed over and nodded to and polished his glasses into further fogginess, and written down exaggerations like a lawyer's credo.

A story told in slow and broken cascades, a waterfall of dreams given words.

_Long, long ago, soon after sky and earth had become separated so that there was room for trees to grow and the tribes of men to move between them, many gods and spirits still lived in the world..._

And most of all this, this to capture the imagination, this to let the mind soar for a little while, to find its own wings, this, Charles thinks, this above all should open the telling of their story, that —

_Once upon a time what happened did happen — and if it had not happened, you would never have heard this story._

For there's a woman with blue skin and golden eyes, and another who takes thoughts and shatters them into diamond shards, and there's a girl with wings, such wings, wings of air and opalescent strength, and a name to match them —

(and was not the devil an angel too?)

And there's a time-shifting, place-shifting, true-faced devil; there's an elegant living hurricane, and what they have in common, what they all have in common, is that nothing can stop them; nothing will ever be able to stop them, because they're led by a man who can make sword-edges, fine sharp severing edges, from nothing more than a paperclip, a man who feels the iron move in his blood

(in others' blood)

more than he senses his heartbeat ( _my heartbeat,_ Charles thinks, _more than he ever felt mine_ ).

He wonders if Emma, with her crystalline mind, can feel the snow as it falls, if it's colder even than her name.

Does frost feel colder than snow?

He won't ask.

Not even now, when they're all on the same side

(however briefly)

not even in this unthought-of moment, will he ask.

He's learned some things from Erik, and one of them is when to force his thoughts into privacy.

And he's a hell of a telepath, he can do that without the need for a helmet, he can block his own mind away from others without outside help.

He sits by the window

(safe, always safe, and the thought mocks his own imaginings)

and watches the snow fall on a scene that not even a white night, a wild night's imaginings could have conjured into being.

Erik and Logan, talking calmly, one or the other putting out a hand now and again to stop over-exuberant

(children)

youth from damaging them or themselves or the really far-too small house they've found themselves trapped in, here in suburbia with the Blackbird unable to land; with Azazel unable to push his powers through the thick flakes; with the world held in ice; and with white curtains of fogged muslin clouding every power.

Impossible, impassible, a soft and whisper-beating fall of muffling silence around them all.

Charles watches Logan and Erik, watches them talk, and does not push out his mind to listen, nor even to brush past them, silent, deaf to all things save the sensing of intent.

He owes them that courtesy.

He owes them that courtesy because he watched, earlier, as Logan trusted Erik to catch him with nothing more than a raised hand; trusted him not to warp his body's unwanted, forced-upon him structure.

Trusted him, and not really with his body

(Logan cares nothing for his body and so trust never enters his calculations)

but rather trusted him because Erik is many, many things, and one of those things, one of those _truths_ is that given the chance — given the moment, given that second of time in which there is still a _choice_ — Erik will make it.

He will never allow a child to be harmed.

Never.

There are so many things that Charles had once believed Erik was incapable of, there are so many things he has done and not done,

(oh my friend, haven't we all?)

but that one truth

(for it is a truth, it is more than a fact, it is more than something known in layman's non-semantic terms as a reality, it is more than an analogy, more even than a synthesis, or a proof extant: this, this and perhaps this alone, for Erik and Magneto, for hope and grief, for despair and longing, for love and despair, this, this is a _truth_ )

remains a constant, a fact strong and self-evident

(we hold these truths...)

and one that shines out clearly enough to even penetrate Logan's cynicism.

They are Logan and Erik, to him, even now while one of them wears a suit belonging to the X-men he claims to despise, and the other stands in a gaudy cape like some fictional general of old; a Caesar or Mark Antony

(Alexander weeping at the end of the world, with nothing more to conquer)

his helmet under his arm like a living Hector, because like that great bronzed horsehair plume had set his own son to inconsolable tears, his protection from Emma

(and from Charles, who knows that while there are some truths which may be self-evident, they are none the less complex for it)

terrified the little girl they had come to save.

Charles knows that he will replay the strange moment again and again, will make himself visualise, in case there was something he missed, the strange moment of Erik kneeling in the snow, cape pooled around him; he will mentally replay that unthought-of gesture, small and simple and so very revealing in every way: Erik removing his helmet (the helmet which is so familiar now that Charles thinks most of them have forgotten the curve of the skull that lies beneath it).

So many of them have never known that uncompromising jaw without its armour.

 _My fierce and midnight captain,_ he had thought then, looking at Erik's half-unaware obeisance, and then he had almost laughed at himself, as the little girl

( _Jean/my name is/I am/this_ her thoughts had said, and to Charles alone; and those same thoughts had spoken and murmured and whisper-chanted of fire and destruction too, though that is his secret, not even shared with the bestower of it, for it is something she still doesn't know she gave to him)

put her hand up to touch the side of Erik's face, and smiled gravely, the gesture so like a queen conferring a favour that Charles had almost forgotten the things her mind had told him lay in store 

(for her, for him, for them all)

and laughed despite himself.

He had known what Erik would be telling her

(you are wonderful, you are magnificent, just as you are, just like this, and you never have to be afraid again)

and he had wondered, wonders still, if Erik too had seen the flames and the end of this strange time of alliance, if he had seen them and consciously refuses, even now amidst the snow and the laughter, to ask Jean, in all her small seriousness, what her real name is.

The question he has never failed to ask any other mutant. And its absence is notable, it is a gap to be probed, like a missing tooth at the back of the mouth, not quite aching and yet not quite secure in its empty space, either.

Erik mastered denial and avoidance long since, Charles knows, but he cannot help suspecting this is something more.

And yet.

And yet.

He will never harm a child. He never will, he never could, or would.

Better, then, that he refuses to know, and the space where that knowledge should be is left to ache for a while, and to dissipate as time passes, and at the last to be forgotten.

The snow falls, and Charles watches in astonishment as Logan holds up his hands like a boxer, palms curled inward; as he lets those terrible claws

(shears)

come out, watches Erik nod, and knows what he is saying

(magnificent, astounding, amazing, you)

though he will never tell Logan, Charles knows, that there is no need to be afraid. There are some lies, like some hurts, that are beyond Erik's capacity to voice or enact.

They are similar in so many ways, Erik and Logan, similar in ways that sometimes make Charles want to laugh, as they posture against the very traits that are identical in one another, and sometimes, and more poignantly, make his heart ache for them.

They are both warriors, they have both suffered, they wrap themselves in their fear and add it to their armoury, and it is a strength that no child should ever have, and that Charles would not take from them at any price

(it is too hard-won, it is too costly, in all senses and meanings of the word

 _thou art too dear for my possessing_ )

and instead allows himself to witness it and be awed by it, here behind his wall of falling snow and hardening ice, of glass and wood and brick, here where no-one needs to know his longing.

Here where he can never be Alexander, but only Caesar, longing for a greatness he is never sure will be his.

_Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing._

Peace does so little for them, and war does less, but Erik is a leader of armies, and Charles is bound and contained into a false peace by more than just his principles or his unfeeling legs, and they are East and West to one another

(and never the twain shall meet)

in so very many more ways than Logan and Erik, despite their much-voiced differences, will ever be.

But for now, just for now, perhaps _only_ for now, Charles can watch a miracle, he can watch Logan and Erik, he can watch the Wolverine and Magneto; he can watch them reconcile their differences, however briefly, within the glow of having fought for something that matters; fought and won, and at no price.

_And, growing tired, we turn aside at last,_  
 _Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers..._

Sean and Alex, who have declared snowball war against Hank and a giggling Jean, fill the air with profanity and apologise for it with each gust of wind, and Raven flickers in and out of different forms, a shadow-lantern of disguise against the white, and Charles allows himself, for once, just for once, to think that this, this here and now, this moment, this —

This is what he once dreamt of.

He is seeing the false Utopia he once imagined, and oh, it _is_ false, it is like the jewels that come from tears, which fade by the morning into nothing more than a pool of colour, and that bleaching out with the sunrise.

It is no less beautiful for its impermanency.

He does not know how he will be able to let it go, when the snow stops falling.

When the time comes.

When Erik puts on his helmet once more, and it is no longer courtesy that keeps Charles from his thoughts.

When he loses Raven once more to her knowledge of her own magnificence.

When Logan runs after his past once more, and forgets them once more, and he is left waiting for another despairing return once more, a return in which he might not even be remembered, but only recalled as someone, some _thing_ , that was once part of a nebulous horror. 

A distant threat.

 _Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb;_  
Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream

It is hard, it is cold, to know that he will endure it and bear it all. 

But he will.

And for now, Charles is content in this little snow-globe moment. He is content while he watches, and while he delights —

— and even while he mourns.

The world he once held such hope for has become, truly, a whited sepulchre. One in which there is so little of truth, and even less of lies; where it is all imaginings and fables, and yet it exists.

One which they must all leave, and turn back or away or aside to follow their own paths —

_... of love or lust or beauty or death or crime..._

And yet —

And yet —

Imperfect as it is, it is nevertheless why they all fight.

Why they all still fight, even when it must be against one another.

Charles, trapped by his own body; trapped by his ethics; trapped behind glass, knows one thing more.

He knows that he can live with that knowledge.

He knows, as Erik turns away from Logan, neither of them posturing for once; as he pulls Raven up from the snow, where she is making more and more absurdly-winged angels for Jean to delight in; he knows as Angel herself chooses to walk behind the two of them, the undisputed leaders of Erik's Brotherhood, and there is no trace of regret or wistfulness showing themselves on her face; he knows as Azazel, grasping Riptide's hand, pulls them all into a wavering line whose passage he can control; even as they disappear, leaving no more than some snow-set impressions and the memory of Jean's laughter behind them, he knows what he is seeing, yes.

How can he not know?

_So you see, wonders abound..._

And he knows that he can live with it.

Because he knows that one day, one day when he least wants to ask for help, when he can least bear the idea of help, this will be all to do again.

And he cannot — quite—stop himself longing for that day to come.

In the silent depths of his well-guarded mind, in the hidden and still-bleeding corners of his wounded heart, he knows that he never will.

He will never stop longing.

He will never stop waiting.

He will never be the one who writes the end of the story.

_And now the story is yours._

 

_And coiling slowly about him, and laughing at him,_  
 _And throwing him pennies, we bear away_  
 _A mournful echo of other times and places,_  
 _And follow a dream . . . a dream that will not stay._


End file.
